An Inside Look Premiere: A True Story of Executing Account-Based Everything

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a hot topic of conversation, and momentum is building to expand this person-first approach from Marketing to Sales and beyond, breaking down department barriers with shared goals: Enter account-based everything (ABE).

But there’s a lot of confusion about what works, what doesn’t, and what’s really involved an account-based program.

“It’s not old wine in a new bottle,” says Dave Sill, our Senior VP of Sales. “It’s an old idea that technology has just empowered – which is really cool.”

An account-based everything experiment

As a company, we’re always focused on growth – both for our customers and ourselves – and part of that focus has been the launch of a lot of new products and datasets over the past couple of years. Historically, DiscoverOrg was known for its IT datasets, and while those are still core to our sales and marketing intelligence, we also have products for teams that sell into marketing, sales, finance, and more.

Recently, we brought a new HR dataset to market. This is a great opportunity to finetune DiscoverOrg’s own ABE approach as we target new accounts we haven’t gone after before. Technology companies selling to HR departments haven’t had great sales and marketing intelligence options previously; so not only are we selling a new product into a new market, we are educating an entirely new group of buyers on how to build a pipeline by investing in true, refined sales and marketing intelligence, versus buying raw data and a crappy list of contacts – which has historically been their only option.

We don’t know exactly what the results will be, but we hope you’ll come along with us to find out.

Given that DiscoverOrg helps our own customers execute a true account-based approach, there’s a real purity to us going through those steps ourselves. It’s no secret that many companies aren’t poster children for practicing what they preach and “eating their own dog food.” Historically, we’ve been no exception (especially before we had datasets that covered our target buyers, sales and marketing departments). Now, we’re much better at putting ourselves in our customers’ shoes, and we are leveraging our own experimentation to help our customers get that much more out of their ABM efforts.

By breaking down the fourth wall, our goal is to inform others about what we learned, what works, and what doesn’t work – in a really authentic and transparent way.

So, how are we approaching this account-based everything plan? We’re using a simple framework.

We’ll be identifying target accounts are that we want to go after based on an ideal customer profile. We’re keeping it relatively finite. We’ll be pulling a subset of accounts out of this orchestration as an A/B test, so we can tell what impact ABE really has, compared to a traditional outbound prospecting method.

We’re orchestrating a multi-channel plan across sales and marketing that will include outbound email, outbound calls, ad targeting, direct mail, personalized videos, and specialized events. We’ll be measuring market penetration, velocity, and deal size to determine what is working and what isn’t working.

We will then compare these results to the accounts where we took a more traditional marketing approach.

We’re going to have fun as we try to prove that we can get a base of new customers buying our HR dataset faster than we’ve been able to get new customers with previous datasets that we’ve launched using a more traditional approach.

I’m excited for this experiment, and I hope you’ll join us as we document our own successes and failures. There will be some great lessons learned that you can apply to your own efforts.